No Blu-ray on MacBook makes Homer something something?

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Steve Jobs rubbished Blu-ray yesterday, calling format a “bag of hurt,” no doubt putting a tear in the eye of message boarders everywhere. (How much do you want to bet that he’ll call the next revision of the iMac “epic”?) But is that a big deal, that Apple, apparently, has no interest in incorporating Blu-ray into its computers, especially when plenty of other manufacturers have already done so?

First, look at Blu-ray—why would the average person want it in their computer? Outside of playing Hollywood movies—their [artistic] quality aside—there’s no reason for Blu-ray to even exist. You certainly don’t need a Blu-ray burner in the age of $150 1TB hard drives, right? And it’s not like the studios are releasing movies exclusively on Blu-ray; it’s still a luxury. Going further, the benefits of 1080p, FullHD yada yada on a 13- or 14-inch screen can be questioned. The rule of thumb is unless your display is 40 inches you’re not really going to “see” the benefits of 1080p. When I watch ill begotten 1080p rips of movies on my 20-inch iMac, then compare that to the 720p version I can’t tell the difference; watching that same 1080p movie on my now obsolete MacBook is like using a sledgehammer to hang up an eight-by-ten photo.

So if Apple doesn’t have to incorporate a Blu-ray drive, why should it?

Then when you figure in that Apple’s golden goose has been iTunes, why would it encourage its consumers to choose a different avenue of buying movies and TV shows? Why tell your customers, “Hey, we have this cool store where you can download Iron Man in a few minutes, in pretty decent quality, but why not go to Amazon or Wal-Mart and buy the Blu-ray version instead?”